the NB Dr. Who iteration is kind of weird.

I think that it was supposed to be mostly a commentary on the negative aspects of the norms and societal expectations, along with the shame from his father causing him to act that way out of deep insecurities. Because his fixation with honor and masculinity was so heavily focused on how he was seen in the community and not giving an opening for people to see him as weak or feminine, that is hammered home in his own internal justifications for his actions.

I do have to say, I think a lot of my distaste of it on the first reading is that superficial reading causes Okonkwo to often come off as the most two dimensional portrayal of toxic masculinity.

I will preface this by saying that I haven’t read it again in over a decade, but I remember mostly liking it on my second read. I switched schools mid high school, so I had to read it twice for school. I didn’t like it the first time, I think I was too young and not interested in interrogating it much the first time I read it, but enjoyed on the second reading.

As you mentioned, it did try to portray precolonization Igbo culture as Achebe understood it. And I thought that it was a brave choice to focus on a lot of flaws and issues with precolonization society, where many characters are some shade of moral grey. Though this does lead some people to think for the same reason that it downplays or softens the problems of colonization, despite that being the titular “things fall apart”, but I obviously feel that wasn’t what Achebe intended. I think that Achebe was trying to portray the motivation for the various downtrodden and Nwoye to go along with Christianity and colonization.

I wish we had more portrayals of precolonization societies in literature.

On the other hand, something like ReactOS could, in theory, work if it was much more mature and had more developers behind it.

Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can’t handle drivers and for security reasons can’t get low level hardware access.

Wow, 14/24 that was more difficult than I thought. TBF I haven’t fully reread the Silmarillion since Middle School, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard.

They can’t make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.

Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.

sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version “pre-prints” of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org

But imagine the quality of service. Unfortunately, the rice in the back kitchen has been spilled, and no food will be prepared until the staff counts all the grains of rice.

Carl Sagan is one of the few people that give me optimism that science education and optimism can bring humanity forward. I don’t think it is actually that simple, but watching his public education programs and appearances really does give me some hope in humanity’s future.

You know, there is an obvious solution…JUST MAKE CLEAN ENERGY AND GREEN SOLUTIONS IN YOUR COUNTRY TOO!

New Sykes-Picot #ExMiddleEast - Günther

Need more meat for the grinder.

Sorry to nerd out, but this reminds me of a senior grad student when I was a first year physics grad student. He was talking about the “order of magnitude” class that some professor was able to set up as a fun class for fulfilling his teaching requirements. It involved calculating or estimating order of magnitude values and putting them in units of something you can relate to (e.g. distance in terms of football fields, or your height, energy in an hour of air conditioning, etc.). In the spirit of this class, this guy used his dick for length and then came up with some other size unit to convert to for homework he had to hand in. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is 5 * 10^19 of this guy’s “dick units”, apparently.

Elon Musk’s children discussing the inheritance, though emerald mines were changed to gold mines for libel reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_58H5vk29VM

Is there something I am missing? I am using uBlock Origin on Firefox and Youtube works the same as always.

Millennium Challenge Rising